The new generation Apama Capital Markets Foundation is built in the form of easily configurable building blocks and includes the following capabilities:

1. A new market data architecture, which provides an increase in performance and flexibility in the processing of cross-asset market data. The architecture makes optimal use of the patented Apama parallel event processing engine that can scale to hundreds of thousands of market data updates per second. The new market data architecture can channel that data into an application as useable information with sustained sub-millisecond latency end-to-end (from the adapter’s receipt of data through to information being available to the application);

2. Native support for new order types and features to enrich application functionality and enhance usability for the developer of Quant trading applications. The developer, using the Apama Capital Markets Foundation, can now handle natively disparate pricing information and data feeds that Exchanges present (including BBO, Market-By-Price, Market-By-Order, RFQ and Trades) and transform them into a single, customizable format based on what the Quant Trader uses;

3. Expanded analytics including integration with additional third party analytics solutions and plug-ins (i.e., Quantlib and Matlab);

4. A risk firewall - a fundamental component of the Apama Capital Markets Foundation - that provides trading and risk management applications with the ability to deliver pre-trade risk management in real-time. The risk firewall’s capabilities include pre-empting trades that exceed their firm’s market risk tolerance and intercepting so-called "fat finger" trades. Such capabilities are critical to trading effectively in today’s volatile markets and are particularly useful as a complement to high frequency trading and to provide a pre-trade risk management capability for sponsored access;

6. New latency measurement functionality. This unique capability allows developers to measure the latency between each step within the application code of their strategies. This enables them to better identify optimization opportunities in the strategies they are creating and help traders improve the performance of their applications; and

7. New sample code and trading strategies to get started.

The Apama Capital Markets Foundation, as its name implies, provides the foundation for a growing portfolio of solution accelerators - pre-built customizable solutions - that include algorithmic trading, market surveillance and monitoring, and FX trading and eCommerce.

21 June 2010

Progress Software Corporation, a leading software provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, today announced that financial services group, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), is live on the Progress Apama FX Aggregation accelerator for its foreign exchange operations. BBVA FX traders are now using the Progress Apama platform along with its customised dashboards to view and trade across aggregated liquidity from a number of Banks and FX ECNs. Alongside increased trader effectiveness, the FX aggregator is also enabling BBVA to use the Progress Apama platform to power advanced FX algorithms and optimized real-time FX prices for their internal and external customers.

Activ Financial will demonstrate its second generation market data processing unit (MPU) technology at Sifma this week. The vendor claims that the hardware-based low latency market data solution will double messaging volumes per second and reduce latency by 50% to 80% to deliver single digit microsecond latency for feed handlers.

Allows the fast comparison of two directories or archive files (jar, zip, war... and also tar/gz) in IntelliJ IDEA, based on file contents. Single file differences can be viewed with the usual IDEA diff window. Diffs in compiled Java classes can also be viewed using the usual IDEA diff window and a built-in Java disassembler. Detects blank-only differences in text files. Can also detect user-defined differences in text files and differences in source file comments, called «non-significant differences». Provides some basic mass-merging facilities on compared files and directories (copy/delete on files or directories).

The Spring Expression Language (SpEL for short) is a powerful expression language that supports querying and manipulating an object graph at runtime. The language syntax is similar to Unified EL but offers additional features, most notably method invocation and basic string templating functionality.

While there are several other Java expression languages available, OGNL, MVEL, and JBoss EL, to name a few, the Spring Expression Language was created to provide the Spring community with a single well supported expression language that can be used across all the products in the Spring portfolio. Its language features are driven by the requirements of the projects in the Spring portfolio, including tooling requirements for code completion support within the eclipse based SpringSource Tool Suite. That said, SpEL is based on a technology agnostic API allowing other expression language implementations to be integrated should the need arise.